A Winter's Day in 1939 is now an e-book...

So a while back I said I had a wee sekrit. The wee sekrit can now be revealed cos it's on Amazon where everyone can see it!! My latest title with Scholastic, A Winter's Day in 1939, is now available as an e-book. You can go see it here, or even better, you might like to buy it :) It has had some very nice reviews (you can see some here or here). Yay!!

And I have been reading some interesting things on the net over the last few days - Barry Eisler's take (at Joe Konrath's blog) on the choices available to authors in today's publishing environment. This ruffled a lot of agent and traditional publisher feathers after they took exception to his suggestion that the only real advantage traditional (legacy) publishers could offer authors was print distribution. All very interesting stuff. I am not opposed to legacy publishing, agents, or self publishing although I also think none are perfect either. But there are two things I do to help myself - 1) keep informed and 2) try to avoid casting anyone as the enemy. An adversarial approach in publishing is no good for anyone.

Then Nathan Bransford took a closer look at the state of e-book sales and pointed out that these aren't declining as has been reported elsewhere. I always cast a jaundiced eye over statistics and try understanding the agenda behind their use and the people using them. It's a bit like the man showing off his 14 year old McDonald's hamburger, which doesn't look a day over 24 hours old, and saying this is why we shouldn't eat junk food. Does anybody ever try keeping any conventional food or home food with salt and sugar in it and say we shouldn't eat that? What about oil or dried fruit? I bet I could keep a box of weetbix for 14 years or even a homemade scone. And just because its appearance is little altered doesn't mean it is edible. And frankly if my appearance didn't deteriorate over 14 years I would be pretty happy (just don't check out that painting in the attic....). Just saying.... that 14 year old burger is not a particularly robust experiment.

And finally in my little trilogy of internet surfing I give you another treatise by Sara Sheridan on what author's really earn. This topic is a perennial favourite with me, partly because I feel most folk persist in having a mistaken belief that authors earn a good deal of money. I do not yet reach the median figure Ms Sheridan quotes in her article. In fact not even half that and yet I have had at least one new title out every year for the last three years and I have kept busy with school visits, workshops, public appearances and other events. And of the money I do earn most does not come from the sale of books. If we seem desperate for funding, its because, well, we are. And we are not thumb twiddlers resting on our fat laurels. The authors and illustrators I know are hard-working people, usually reliant on some secondary method of supporting themselves.

Statistics: A Mystery

Apparently the news is good. In a tough economic landscape when e-books and other changes threaten sales of print books, New Zealand's book sales are doing better than most. Looking at market share for New Zealand titles, non fiction has 32%, children's books 17% and fiction 3 %. Looking at those numbers I'm trying to decide if we children's writers are punching above our weight. 17% feels pretty good. There are a lot of overseas titles coming in all the time so I think 17% represents quite an effort on the parts of both consumers and producers. When I think of the local children's writers and illustrators I know the scene feels vibrant, the quality of books strong, their production of a terrific quality. When I think a little harder about the statistics it becomes a little unclearer. I will presume that the 3% refers to adult fiction only. Not sure where YA sits but I'm going to say its put with children's fiction as that's what tends to happen. Trouble comes of thinking of children's books as one genre. They aren't. Would be interesting to drill down further and see what proportion of the 17% are pb's versus novels etc... Still 17% is an interesting number. 3 % is an interesting number too. I wonder what the numbers were for the preceding period. Has our market share grown, shrunk or remained static? How do these numbers compare with market share of their own books in other countries? I can't imagine we have a market share significant enough to be measurable in any other country. What other country's literature has an independently significant market share here? What I'm trying to get my head around is what these numbers should actually mean for today's authors and illustrators in New Zealand? What can we do to improve things? Can we improve our impact in some other country? Statistics seem to tell a story but strip away the unknowns and they are only half the story and definitely not the climax or the resolution. Should I feel happy? Or sad? I'm not really sure.